Larry Page says there he would like to see more open standards used, and he is sad the industry isn't moving in that direction. So why isn't any of their new IM technology an open standard?
Because their old one was an open standard, and they were effectively the only one open one (and the last open one standing). So I find it totally reasonable that they stopped caring about it (and probably would again if another major player did).
I find it a very lame excuse. If they care about it, it shouldn't depend on others. In the end, it shows they didn't care enough.
I'm pretty upset at Google about how they handled IM. It basically cost me more than a half of my contacts (who use Google), since first XMPP federation with Google Talk stopped working when Google refused to support server to server encryption, and now it's being dropped altogether. So much for moving things forward, instead of falling into the dark ages of incompatible balkanized instance messaging services.
That decision basically killed instant messaging for me. I miss it, but there just isn't any critical mass anymore. I could run half a dozen different messaging apps, each one reaching some subset of my friends, most of whom are never available anyway, but the old situation where it was easy to keep in touch with people via chat just doesn't exist anymore.
God damn it. I do not want to use the Google Hangouts experience. Talk is a simple, elegant chat application. That is all I require and all I desire from Google. And I do not want to be patronized about how I actually want more "integration" with google products.
Hangouts is solid proof that no one at Google uses the multiple account support. If they did, it wouldn't be so awful. I click a hangout link for a work call and get "no one in the call". I have to add authuser=1 to the URL manually to see that it's actually that I don't have permission to it.
This happens to me on GSuite all the time, I actually stopped using it and just call in a separate conference line. I would show up, usually first to the meeting, and it would just sit and say no one is around. Then I could logout, log back in and I'd see everyone else was suddenly there. I missed 2-3 meetings at my newest job because of this. This is the paid version of Google too, absolutely not acceptable. My old job had Office 365 and I long for it, it's just not as competitively priced for SMBs.
When Google Talk is discontinued, folks will gravitate to the next IM message like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger or even Twitter DM. Gmail, well there are other client to use. Search, umm, what can we do here? DuckGoGo?
A lot of my friends that are friends with me on FB for some reason prefer DMing me on Instagram... Such a weird trend, but it's honestly a thing amongst our group. Either that or Snapchat group chats.
Same here, weirdly enough. In order of most messages exchanged per service, in my friend circles it goes:
Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. By the time google talk came around, third party clients were easily connecting to all the other major IM services. I don't think the open protocol made any difference to its popularity.
Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. It would have been much harder for Google to bootstrap at the time, if they hadn't been able to just point people to existing clients that supported XMPP. Third party clients made Talk useful faster (thus popularizing it). Sure, several of the third party clients were pretty good at reverse engineering weird protocols while also supporting o…
Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched.
Didn't it? I think it had a client from the get go
Because being constrained by existing standards, rather than being free to make the changes to the protocol that you think will make the product better, is a huge trade-off. The benefit is that your users get that interoperability with e.g. MSN Messenger or Skype or whatever. However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications bu…
Someone has to start doing it, otherwise you'll get the catch 22. So "others aren't doing it" is not an excuse.
But they did start doing it with XMPP and kept it that way for a while.
If you're looking for a future in federated chat: matrix.org. I think there's real potential in the protocol and Im slowing moving most of my chat activity there.
Matrix looks interesting, though I'm not sure why they use HTTP for transport. Sounds a bit counter intuitive, since HTTP was never built for proper duplex communication. XMPP (in the browser) had to use BOSH to work around that, then came WebSockets, WebRTC and so on. Another intereting one is Tox.
This is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing but I guess others don't see it that way. People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with pe…
Is your phone's Do Not Disturb feature broken?
My phone is always on silent and usually in another room. I have a first generation Mi Fit band that is setup with unique vibrations, colors, and quiet hours so that I can keep abreast of communications without persistent flashing notifications or interrupting activities.
The Gmail part would go something like: Google discontinues Gmail and Google Inbox is the replacement! Then a year later, Google intros Mail from Google, a new webmail client that is like Inbox, but has more of the classic email interface UX that users expect. A year later, they announce Inbox is going away and everyone should move to Mail from Google, which they have rebranded "Gmail".
In a den of lions when saying this, but companies that do that have too many engineers. There's a "right" size for any project and going over it's hard to avoid over-thought, over-complicated, user-confusing, pedantic, semantic things. This isn't the trite "too many cooks" argument. It's that the right kind of quick-and-dirty shortcutters who value leaving things alone produce better products; they use simpler paradi…
I think it's just as easily a sign that you might have too much or too little of a marketing department. Too much marketing influence and they create busy work for themselves like rebranding your existing products every year or so to keep them "fresh". Too little marketing influence and engineers are free to build unmarketable products without clear brands or focuses, and (closer to hand to this discussion) free to ignore the built-in good will and momentum of maintaining existing brands and products.
Sure, it's easy to blame engineers for focusing on new shiny ideas and only wanting to work in fresh codebases and "new" products, but it's just as much the fault of their management and the company not trying to adequately control its own brand(s) and how its users perceive it.
This is just the further erosion of manners, respect, and privacy that is so pervasive these days. No one is ever allowed any down time, we're always online and anytime is a good time to talk. To me this feels like a bad thing but I guess others don't see it that way. People use to never call you after 9pm or during dinner time. If your phone rang during a meal you didn't answer it. If you didn't want to chat with pe…
You are allowed down time. If people don't respect/understand that, it's their problem, no yours. I don't answer the phone when I eat or after 10pm. Same thing with text messages/emails. "Do not disturb" mode is there for a reason.
"Do not disturb" is there because people do not respect each other anymore.